As I mentioned in the class, I got to be a guest writer for a blog in New Brunswick. Check it out. They posted Chapter 1 of The King of Swords, my first novel, here.

In the meantime racking up rejection letters. Yay!

Cheers,Connie Cook

Hi, Brian.

Thanks to the Wednesday
Afternoon Intensive class, who critiqued a story of mine so beautifully – they
saw it under the title "Woman without a past" – I was able to tweak
and massage my work before I submitted it to the Burlington Public Library
Short Story Contest in November 2013.

The story tied for third place!

So thanks to you as
well, for facilitating many wonderful critiquing sessions, for bringing so many
great writerly types together to help each other, and for adding in your own
wisdom. Lovin' the classes!

I have a story on
CommuterLit. It’s the one I wrote in your workshop with Kelley Armstrong.

See you in class on
Thursday,

Hannah McKinnon

Read Hannah’s story, “The
Jacket,” here.
See her bio and links to all the stories she’s published on CommuerLit here.
For information about submitting to CommuterLit, see here.

Writer to Writer:

Hi, Brian.

I am looking for a
writer's group in Hamilton to meet once a month and share work, offer feedback,
and provide encouragement. Can you share my email, mich720@gmail.com, with others who may be
looking for the same thing?

Sunday, March 30, 2014

House of Anansi Press, 384 pages, $19.95 paperback
or $16.95 e-book, available here. For information about submitting to House of Anansi, see here.

Blood: the
Stuff of lifewas written as a series
of essays for the CBC Massey Lectures by Lawrence Hill. Hill’s essays describe
ways that blood seeps into virtually all aspects of life: religion, science, literature, politics, art,
biology and history. From a social and historic point of view, blood unites and
divides us all.

From blood transfusions
to blood groups, HIV/AIDS to diabetes, Hill follows the trail of blood through
history. For example, although the term blood
quantum does not appear in the Indian Act (Canada), it does influence the
ways in which the 614 First Nations consider membership. Hill explains how the
Supreme Court rejected the concept of blood quantum of the Metis, and referred
instead to the heritage of native peoples.

This particular section
regarding blood quantum was informative, considering the variation of legislation
from 1939 to 2001 regarding identities of Inuit and “Indians”. Add to that the federal vs. provincial laws
and understandings, and you’ve got the kind of blood mystery that Hill loves.
He realizes that “blood” is more than identification; it can mean rights under
treaties, getting housing, and other resources.

Most fascinating was his
treatment of the language of blood; such as, “bad blood,” “bleeding hearts” and
“blood brothers.” He gives us bloody good examples of pioneers in the research
of blood such as Iganz Semmelweis whose 19th century studies caused him to be
ostracized for his work, and then, in an ironic twist, died of blood poisoning.

But Hill is at his best
when he describes his personal experiences such as in his opening anecdote of
Hill as a boy watching his blood drip on the sidewalk. “Looking back, I wonder about the mad impulse
to hold out my arm and splash every sidewalk panel.”

Most readers can
identify. From blood’s proof of his existence as a boy to his later
understandings of blood’s profound impact on every part of his life, Hill pulls
us in every time when he writes about his fascination with the stuff of
life.

Two stories seemed of particularly
importance to him. One story occurred in
Niger in 1979 when, as a volunteer, he contracted gastroenteritis so severe that
he needed a blood transfusion. He
describes well the process of his concern over whose blood he was receiving
only to realize that it didn’t really matter if it was African or European. Blood
would not make him someone else. Blood saved him.

The other story concerns blood as it relates to
family. In many of his books, including the novel The Book of Negroes, blood
is central to family. Blood is used
interchangeably with race or identity, blood lines or blood lineage. Remarrying and acquiring stepchildren forced
Hill to think about the meaning of family.

This topic which he explored fully should be essential
reading for all families who have step-children, step-parents or adopted
children. Hill worked out to his satisfaction the meaning of blood in his life.
Perhaps we can acquire some degree of his heightened awareness of what it means
to have blood and be blood. We can learn
from him.

When
reading this book late at night, it is Hill’s personal stories which resonate
far more than the collection of historical facts, conjectures and essay topics.
Although thought provoking, the inclusive list of exhaustive subjects which
relate to blood begins to coagulate.
Perhaps it is the kind of book which you read, reread another day, then
puts away until it summons you again to explore those life blood issues.

Sally Wyliehas
recently retired from her career in Early Childhood Education. In 2012,
she co-authored her 4th edition of the text titledObserving Young
Children: Transforming early learning through reflective practicewith Nelson Publishing. She has
published numerous articles in Canadian Journals on subjects relating to early
childhood. She is happy to finally be writing fiction and be part of a
writing circle!

P.S. For the past three years Canada Writes has put on a public writing
challenge around the subject of that particular year’s Massey Lecture. In 2013,
what resulted was a publically submitted collection to Canada Writes of Canadian
stories about family trees called Bloodlines.

If you do any kind of creative
writing, fiction or nonfiction, this
workshop is for you. We’ll tackle the nitty-gritty of putting words on paper in
a way that will grip the reader’s imagination.

You'll learn how to avoid common
errors that drain the life from your prose. And you'll discover how to make
your writing more vivid, more elegant and more powerful.

Workshop leader Brian Henry has
been a book editor and creative writing instructor for more than 25 years. He
publishes Quick
Brown Fox, Canada’s
most popular blog for writers, teaches creative writing at Ryerson University
and has led workshops everywhere from Boston to Buffalo and from Sarnia to
Charlottetown. But his proudest boast is that he has helped many of his students get their first
book published and launch their careers as authors.

Fee: 34.51 + 13% hst = 39 paid
in advance by mail or Interac
or 37017 + 13% hst = 42 if you wait to pay at the door

Friday, March 28, 2014

CommuterLitseeks
submissions for its new print anthology. The theme is “Arrivals and
Departures.” Let your imaginations roam. “We’re looking for poetry, stories and
memoir with a maximum length of 2,500 words.”

Authors whose work is accepted for the
anthology will be compensated via a cut from the sales. Submit through the
regular CommuterLit General
Submission channel; but mention in your letter you are submitting for the print
anthology: here.

CommuterLit also continues to accept
submissions for daily on-line publication. They acceptshort stories, novel excerpts and poetry (one poem or a series of
poems), in any genre, with a word count of 500 to 4,000. On occasion CommuterLit
will run stories and excerpts up to 12,000 words in length, serializing the
story and running it over a number of days.

Bastionis a new
science fiction magazine publishing digitally on the first of every month. With
the first issue coming out April 1, 2014. Each issue will contain 8 to 10
original short stories. Our yearly anthology will be available in both digital
and print formats in early December.

Payment: $20 for the first 2,000 words then $0.01 for each word thereafter, up
to a maximum of $50 per story.

Submissions: Bastion seeks great
science fiction. How you choose to meet this requirement is up to you.
Consider that science fiction is merely a backdrop from which outstanding
stories are written. Horror, detective, and thrillers are all acceptable as
long as there's some element of science fiction present (no romance or
erotica). No serials, fan fiction, or anything unoriginal, please. Your story
should stand on its own.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

http://lkgagency.com/Caitlen Rubino-Bradwayjoined
the LKG Agency in 2008. Before that she was with Don Congdon Associates literary
agency. She is now beginning to build her own list and is actively looking for
new authors.

“I
personally am looking for middle grade and young adult fiction,” says Caitlen. “Please,
no picture books or early chapter books. And please, no dystopian futures
(it’s not really my thing), a lot of violence (also not my thing), or books
written in the present tense. (Wow, I just describedThe Hunger Games,
didn’t I?) Please, no zombies.

“Please do send fantasy, whether
it be likeHarry Potterand Sarah Prineas’ Winterling trilogy (contemporary fantasy
about modern kids!); or Stephanie Burgis’Kat, Incorrigibleseries, and Patricia Wrede and
Caroline Stevermer’sSorcery and Cecelia(historic fantasy re-writes with both
humor and heart!); or Kristen Cashore’sGraceling, Jessica
Day George’sPrincess of the Midnight Ball,
and Erin Bow’s devastatingPlain Kate(traditional fantasy! With
horses!). And, why, yes, I am listing some of my favorite books on
purpose, on the chance that you have read these and your book compares
favorably to one of them.

“On a related note, please do
send sci-fi, which I also love, having grown up on Star Trek: TNG. Anne
Osterlund’sAcademy 7will forever hold a place in my heart
because it is a futuristic sci-fi with spaceships and lasers, but it also has a
boarding school! (I love books with boarding schools.) Ah, that
reminds me: please do send things with boarding schools.

Please, please, please send fairy
tale re-tellings. Please.

“In my spare time, I am
an author in my own right (or is that write?). My first book, Lady Vernon and Her Daughter, which I co-wrote with my
mother, was released by Crown in 2009. We also contributed to Jane Austen Made Me Do It, published by Ballantine in
2011. My first middle grade novel, Ordinary Magic,was
published by Bloomsbury Children’s in 2012.”

Lauren Galit, the lead agent at LKG is also looking for authors. She
represents only nonfiction and specializes in women’s focused
how-to, such as parenting, lifestyle, health & nutrition, and beauty.

“More than anything else, The LKG Agency is looking
for books that pique our interest,” says Lauren. “Truly original memoirs with
something to share, how-to with a new and interesting take on a subject,
writers with a strong voice that carries the reader along.”

Brian Henry will lead “How
to Get Published” in Guelph on April 12 with literary
agent Sam Hiyate (see here), in
London on April 19 with literary agent Olga Filina (see here), in
Stouffville on May 24 with literary agent Carly Watters (see here) and in
Ottawa on June 22 with literary agent Maria Vicente (see here).

And Brian will lead a "Writing for Children & for Young Adults" workshop on May 31 in
Burlington (see here).

But the best way to get your
manuscript ready for publication is with a weekly course. Note this new
course: “Intermediate Creative Writing" on Wednesday evenings in Burlington (see here) and check
out the details of all course starting in March and April here.

Saturday, March 22, 2014

My father had a dusty white pick-up for work, which
he sometimes took me in to the construction site. While he spoke to the
foreman, I wandered through the stacks of steel rebars. At the beams, I
balanced, one white trainer in front of the other, hopping onto the next and
then the next, in whichever shape they lay. The challenge was not to step
off the beam. The ground beneath was a sea of poisonous water.

Also, the site was an ideal place to find
stones. I searched out the smoothest, flattest ones from the large piles,
rubbed them in my palm and dropped them into my little shorts pocket for hop-scotching
on our verandah later on. I would play against myself, favouring one
stone then the other.

One afternoon at the site, from my place on the top
of one of the sand mounds, I saw a Land Rover arrive with a boy in the front
seat. His father stepped out and disappeared off somewhere to talk to my
father, but the boy stayed sitting with his arm resting on the open window
sill. I stepped, sideways two skips at a time, grains seeping into my
runners, down the mound.

“I’m Anna,” I said up through his window. I
tucked my thumbs into my pockets.

He bucked his head. “What were you doing on
the sand heap over there?”

“Climbing. I might be a mountain climber when
I grow up. Do you want to come and try?”

He opened the door and stepped down. He was
taller than me. He ran his hand through his hair – he had curls almost
the same shade as the pale rusty sand mound.

“Race you,” he called and sprinted off.

It took me only a second and I was after him.
Of course he arrived at the peak first. I didn’t care. I hailed
from the top as loud as my lungs would allow. “Daddy, look at us!”

The boy was Mark; his father owned the godown, his
grandfather the whole coffee estate in the highlands around Mount Kenya.
He lived with his parents on the South Coast, across the ferry, past the shanty
houses with tin roofs in Likoni, past the turn offs to big beach hotels where
Europeans came to holiday, in a forest of coconut trees, by a broad stretch of
white powder sand.

Our families grew close in a short time, and soon
my mother, my father and I were spending the weekends at Mark’s house. I
learned how to swim in the spot of Indian Ocean in front of their garden.
Mark and my father taught me – from my father to Mark, from Mark to my father,
I paddled, clinging to each one. Back and forth, until I could move like
a fish. Above and under water.

Mark taught me how to sword fight with sticks we
found in the garden. He showed me the right stance from which to jut
forward and attack, the right angle to raise my arm in defence.

We dug giant holes on the beach, connecting each
one with a tunnel that eventually lead down to the water so we could watch the
surf erode our underground city.

Under the sun, after a long afternoon,
the copper streaks in Mark’s hair muted to a soft gold. The freckles
under his tan would spread wide over his nose and across his cheeks.
Sometimes we stayed inside and lay on our stomachs on the bedroom’s cool
concrete floor and invented worlds with his collection of Playmobile
figures.

Our favourite business though, was playing Vasco da
Gama, the first European explorer to reach Mombasa. In the afternoons,
while the parents sat in the sitting room under the ceiling fan with their
ice-drenched gin tonics, to escape the heat, Mark and I snuck to the other side
of the fence, to the abandoned plot next door.

We trekked, swords in
hand, through weeds that reached our knees. The doors to the broken down
house were locked, but we fashioned its dilapidated verandah into our
ship. Many times, by mistake, I stepped on one of the thick black thorns
that grew from creepers along the edges of the beach, and Mark pulled it from
my heel. When a branch scratched my knee, he blew the dirt from the
gash. “You alright?” he asked. I nodded and on we went.

But one day, I was seven years old, Mark was inside
doing schoolwork and I was playing with my father on the beach.

My father was swirling me in the air. With a
swish, he swung me high, and held me flat like a plank above his head. He
swooped me this way and that, while he jogged along the water’s edge, so I
could pretend I was a bird.

“Faster, Daddy, faster! You have to create a
wind, to lift my wings.”

“You’re asking the impossible.” He laughed
out. “It’s the middle of the day.”

“Try. Just try, Daddy.”

He picked up speed, and I became a seagull, gliding
through the spotless sky. The sticky air flattened my face, fluttered my
eyelashes. Torrents of giggles spurted from my mouth, I couldn’t stop
them.

“I have to pee, Daddy,” I screamed between
peals. “Stop! I have to pee.”

With an easy whoosh, he landed me onto the warm
powder sand.

“Stay here,” I said. “I’ll be back in a
second.”

“You’re not going to run all the way up to the
house, are you?”

“I have to, right away, or I’ll pee in my
swimsuit.”

“You can go in the water.” He winked at
me.

“That’s gross.”

“Try it, fish do it all the time. And you
don’t have to worry, the sea washes away everything.”

“Fish do it all the time?”

“Of course. They don’t have toilets in the
ocean, do they? They have to pee in the water.”

“And jellyfish and the crabs too?”

“That’s right.”

“Okay, I’ll be a crab.” I scuttled sideways
into the sea, with my arms and legs bent, until the ripples reached my
shoulders, and I was treading water.

When I came back out, my father and I decided to
bury ourselves in the sand. So we started to dig the holes. My back
was to the sea, and I was facing the garden, burrowing away like a frenzied
dog. I happened to look up, and there was Mark, sprinting across the
lawn. I jumped to my tip toes, lifted my hands to my mouth and yelled as
loud as I could.

“Mark, we’re over here. Come bury yourself
with us.”

He zipped on as though he hadn’t heard. All
the way to the edge of the yard, where the bougainvillea fence with its five
hundred magenta blooms separated this garden from the next.

“I think he’s gone to the Baobab,” I said to my
father. “I’m going to go and get him.”

And away I skipped along the beach until I was
standing under the huge, old Baobab.

The tree reminded me of an elephant. It was a
pinky grey, and probably the oldest and fattest of all the trees in the
world. It had no leaves at the moment, because we were in the middle of
the dry season, when the Baobab loses its foliage and looks like a ghost
tree. But its branches were made for adventure: intricate, wide and
hundred-fold. I couldn’t wait to be old enough to climb them.

The
smooth trunk of this particular Baobab divided at the root, just where it left
the ground, and grew up in three parts; Mark and I often stepped into the
centre, leaned against one division and propped our feet up against
another. And we’d sit inside the centre of the tree. We played there
often, competing with the ants, who were also quite fond of the middle of the
old Baobab.

Some of the branches stretched all the way out over
the sand. A few times the tide had come up so high that when Mark jumped
down from the lowest branch he landed in the surf.

His parents had left a wooden ladder leaning
against the trunk for him to get to the lowest branches, and by the time I
reached the tree now, Mark was already stepping off the top rung onto the first
one. I wasn’t allowed on the ladder or up on any of the branches.
But as I stood with my neck craned upwards, looking at him, an idea burst into
my head.

I had been dying to climb the way Mark did. Every time I
saw his legs dangling off that first branch or his arms gripping the one above,
pulling himself up to sit even higher in the tree, my body itched to do the
same and I imagined it was me doing all those things. But now – now I was
going to do it. I was going to go all the way up.

Ingrid
Haring-Mendes has just
completed her first novel, Tears of a Painter, a story set
against the backdrop of East Africa. When she isn't writing you can find
her behind her camera or constructing elaborate Lego structures with her two
boys.

Brian Henry has been a book editor, writer, and creative writing instructor for more than 25 years. He teaches creative writing at Ryerson University. He also leads weekly creative writing courses in Burlington, Mississauga, Oakville and Georgetown and conducts Saturday workshops throughout Ontario. His proudest boast is that he has helped many of his students get published.